Following the recent prequel to His Dark Materials, Phillip Pullman has been accused of lingering in his own fantasy universe. Yet this new journey does raise useful questions about literary perception.

The historical presence of black people in sixteenth-century England has been deliberately obscured since the days of empire. Efforts to revise these false accounts have unearthed remarkably integrated black Tudors.

Can we ever transcend our representations of the external world? Is our knowledge undermined by the contingency of our beliefs? Philosopher Amia Srinivasan discusses these questions and others with the ORB.

On 30th January 2018, Helen Dunmore was posthumously awarded the Costa Book of the Year Award for her poetry collection, Inside the Wave. In her memory, we are publishing the transcript of the last interview she gave, which was printed in embedded form in the first issue of the ORB.

Catalonian and Kurdistani dreams of independence have come close to realisation. Untangling these events involves recognising the political and economic realities accompanying the national mythologies.